There are more drug users walking along the busy Queen Street sidewalk than there are gathered on the steps of Old City Hall for a formal anti-drug law protest.
Check your pockets: aspirin, Adderall, Viagra, Ritalin, cigarettes. Even that cup of coffee warming your hands on this frigid, rainy day contains an addictive caffeine.
You get the point. “We are all drug users,” Kai’enne Tyrmerik from the youth harm reduction collective TRIP!, shouts into the microphone at this rally hosted by the Prison Moratorium Action Coalition, Thursday afternoon (March 10).
The group of 40 is here to protest the Tories’ tough-on-crime laws that are swelling Canada’s prison system with non-violent offenders and specifically, Bill S-10, which aims to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act so that there are mandatory-minimum sentences for drug offences. (Think one year for six pot plants).
The bill is currently in its third reading and awaiting royal assent before it passes as law likely sometime this month.
Other voices in the amped-up crowd include a sex worker from Maggie’s, reps from the Toronto Sex Workers Action Project calling for the decriminalization of sex work, an activist from Toronto Hash Mob and a young mother recalling the 12 months she spent incarcerated back in 2006.
All are demanding that the federal government direct attention to community-based response programs, like providing education and rehabilitation to inmates and the funnelling of money into building communities, not prisons.
According to the NDP public safety critic, Don Davies, whom NOW calls later, the Conservative government will spend $500 million on prison construction next year. At the same time, says Davies, rehabilitation programs like the Youth Gang Prevention Fund, which works to keep at-risk youth out of gangs and costs the federal government $6.5 million a year to maintain in penitentiaries, will be cut at the end of the month.
This, he says, is “absolutely immoral” and “stupid economics,” especially because the average annual cost of maintaining a male inmate in a maximum-security prison is $223,687 (females are $343,810 per year), according to a 2008-2009 report from the Parliamentary Budget Office.
When the Conservatives took power in 2006, there were 12,500 people in federal custody. Today, the toll is around 13,500, even though statistically speaking, crime rates have declined 17 percent since 1999, according to a Stats Can report.
“The problem with mandatory minimum sentences is that it’s a one-size-fits all approach,” Davies adds. “Everyone goes to prison, it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are.”
Dealing with the skyrocketing rate of re-offenders as well as strained budgets due to housing the influx of inmates, is why many U.S. states are back-peddling on the tough-on-crime laws that were implemented 25 years ago, he says.
“We know there’s no jurisdiction in the world that has seen its crime rate come down and recidivism lowered by locking more people up for longer periods of time. In fact it’s the opposite.”
The increase in numbers of incarcerated Canadians, says U of T criminologist, Anthony Doob, is partly due to the fed’s passage of the Truth in Sentencing Act in 2010, which limits the credit inmates receive for time served while awaiting and facing trial, as well as imposed restrictions on conditional sentencing (delineating rules an offender must follow in order to remain out of prison.)
It’s still too early to asertain, he says, whether the Harper government’s 2008 Tackling Violent Crime Act, with its harsher mandatory minimum sentences for firearm offenses, is responsible for expanding the federal prison population.
“Increasing punishment doesn’t make communities safer,” says Doob. “People need to realize there is a better use of money than putting it into prisons.”
Liberal public safety critic Mark Holland calls Bill S-10 an “outrageous piece of legislation.” He says that the government should instead focus in investing in a plan to deal with mental health and addictions, citing that over 80 per cent of inmates suffer from these problems that are at the root of many crimes.
Back at the rally, Ryerson social work students, Nick Carveth, a recovered addict, and Simona Babiak stick around after the speeches to explain why they’re here. Someday, they’d both like to work with youth coping with substance abuse, and find long-term realistic solutions. “Not put them though the prison system,” says Babiak angrily.
